...more recent posts
Here is what might be considered the canonical text for the anti-copy-protect-everything crowd. Long, but well reasoned. It's all in there.
Disenchanted's linkback is something similar to what I've been working on. If I understand their's correctly, I think my implementation is better. If you link to any specific post on this page (to a URL given by a [link] link,) and then follow that link to this page, it will be noted by this page below the post you link to. I call this reference logging. It shows up below the post as [1 ref]. Click on that and you'll see the reference along with a link back to the page that made it. My system even goes to your page and grabs a little bit of text around the link you made and adds that (sort of like a comment.)
Flash time waster:
flashback
Bruce Sterling gave a talk at the Computers Freedom and Privacy Conference in San Fran on April 19th. Sort of rambling, but Sterling is always worth a look in my opinion.
I mentioned the new Apple Powerbook below. That is my dream machine. Really beautiful, I think. Some of the design team from that project left Apple and started a company, oqo, that has released a very small full powered computer. Their flash heavy (why? oh why?) web site is here.
These stats are from the internetweek article:
Smaller than your average paperback book, the standalone device measures 4 inches by 2.9 inches and weighs less than 0.9 ounces. It sports a 4-inch, super-bright VGA color LCD; Synaptics touchscreen; 256-Mbyte onboard RAM; 10-Gbyte+ hard drive; 13914 FireWire; USB; audio; OQO-link connectors; and 802.11b Bluetooth wireless networking.
The "ultra-personal computer," as its makers now call it, is still in development, but is expected to be commercially available from consumer electronics resellers later this year, said Jory Bell, OQO president and CEO.
Here's the news.com article with a tiny picture. I'll try to find some better shots. It really is amazing looking. It runs Windows XP, so I'm not interested in that, but I'm sure it will run linux before too long (if it doesn't already.) This is a good indication of the kind of miniturization that is coming to the market.
So much has happened while I've been away (well, I haven't really been away, but I've been too busy to write.) I'm going to try to catch up on a few highlights.
First up, the mozilla web browser has finally reached 1.0. They are calling it 1.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1.) So while it's not the official we promise it's done 1.0 release (which should come in the fall) it is a maybe it's done 1.0 release. And really it is done. I'm sure they will do a lot of polishing between now and the final 1.0, but it's ready to go today. It really works well. I strongly encourage everyone to check it out. Moving away from Internet Explorer is very important for the future health (and diversity) of the web. You can download it here (9 to 14 megs, depending on your platform.)
I've been using Mozilla as my main browser since 0.9.4. I thought 0.9.8 was basically good enough - but it had some serious text area weirdness that kept me from recommending it. I'm all about text areas. 1.0 RC1 fixed that and other less anoying stuff. I still don't use mail, or news reader, or composer, or IM - but the browser itself is rock solid (on OS X at least,) renders fast, and once you use tab browsing there is no going back.
It took a long time, but this really is a triumph.
I'll also note chimera which is a project to build a native Mac OS X browser using gecko, the heart of the Mozilla browser project. (Mozilla is all open, so it's not only good in itself, but it enables all sorts of other creative projects.) While I think Mozilla looks good on OS X, chimera looks amazing. Native OS X apps have access to sophisticated text rendering, and this puts it to good use. Chimera is only at 0.2.6, and not really usable yet. But if it gets there I'll switch.
If you're on OS X and want some guidence, click through to the comments below...
I put the new backend on the site this morning. Had a few rough spots during transition, but not too bad. Or so it seems. We'll see after a little more use if there are problems I can't see yet.
Assuming it went as smoothly as I think it did, I should be back to posting again.
I'll start writing again soon. Been trying to figure a few things out. Almost there. Changes will be made.
New system is on schedule for release by May 1.
Dan Bricklin gets some extended time with a segway.